Your Morning Boost - Budget Crisis? Three Smart Ways to Cut School Spending Without Harming Students

Welcome to your Morning Boost, brought to you by AWB Education. Here we amplify knowledge, widen reach, and broaden impact in education, delivering your daily dose of professional development. This program is sponsored by Grundmeyer Leader Services, where together we are transforming education, one leader at a time. Now get ready to amplify your day with your Morning Boost. Hello, Happy Tuesday, everybody, and welcome back to your Morning Boost. Hope you have a wonderful Tuesday ahead of you, and we are here to infuse your day with a little smart, strategic thinking designed to make your work in education even more impactful. Today, we're going to dive back into the mailbag just like we did yesterday. Got a great question from Drake yesterday, and today we've got another one that's going to help us address a topic that's really top of mind for all educators, especially this time of year. So we will be right back with question number two this week as we dive into a little budget talk, and we'll be doing so right after this. Okay, So today's question is from Janelle, an educator in Michigan, who asks, our school budget is tighter than ever and I'm hearing about more significant cuts coming down the road. What are some ways we can reduce spending that won't directly harm our programs or increase teacher workload. Well, Janelle, that is an awesome question, and I appreciate the fact that your goal right out of the gates is to tackle the problem, but do so by not directly harming your programs or increasing teacher workload, which really at the heart of that is having a direct impact on students. So I think that's very honorable that that is really your ultimate goal right here. And this is a puzzle of educational life right now. How do we maintain excellence in the face of all these financial constraints. There is not any magic bullet. I'm just gonna say that outright. There are a lot of strategies that will focus on operational efficiency and leveraging resources, and those are the ones we want to try to focus on before we ever touch the classroom. Often, these decisions are going to have to be made at the leadership level, and this is how you can try to advocate for smart, less disruptive cuts and continue to contribute to efficiency overall. So the first thing I would say, or my first piece of advice would be to advocate for a focus on maybe some utility and energy audits. It's surprising how much schools spend on simple energy bills. Many schools overlook this, and this could be pretty significant. This can come from simply just optimizing utilities, look at inefficiencies and heating, cooling, lighting systems. I know schools that have switched to LED lighting throughout a district. Yeah, it's an initial cost and sometimes that's difficult to be able to stump. That can be able to do, but the long term cost of switching to more efficient lighting really has this continuous return on investment year after year. Like for example, one district that I've worked with that they installed smart thermostats and all of their buildings. The savings in the first year alone from just automatically lowering the temperature and unused wings and building that upon their schedule. I mean, the savings was incredible. It was enough for them to cover the cost of a full time instructional aid in the classroom. Another option here is we can promote sensualization and streamlining of purchasing. So a lot of school districts there are individuals or maybe even individuals within each team that will have a certain budget amount that they will be allowed to spend. I know darn well that if my supervisor says, you know, here's a budget for five thousand dollars, I'm going to spend four nine ninety nine dollars and maybe even a few cents because I know that that budget is not going to come back next year, so I've got to spend all of the money that gets to And I get that, I understand and that concept. However, that doesn't give us an opportunity to really truly prioritize what it is that we are going to spend money on. So one thing that I've done in the past is have all of my department chairs or my coaches or whatever my program is that I'm working with give me their list of all of the items that they feel that they need to be able to produce the work that we want for our students every single day, and I ask them to do that in a prioritized order. Put the top of your list to be the stuff I have to have that we really cannot survive without, all the way down to the things that if we have money available, we'd really like to be able to get these things. And then we get to a point where I've got a certain budget that I'm able to work with, and I can only get down the list to a certain point. At that point, I start looking at the kind of optional things or if we have money left over, And maybe this is a point where we start plotting this out year by year. Maybe the science department's going to get a few of those extra things this year, but next year they won't get any of those, and instead we'll shift that focus over to math, or we'll shift that over to the fifth grade team instead of the fourth grade team this year. That gives an opportunity to kind of share the load amongst your building or amongst your district, with all departments chipping in but still being able to get the exact thing they need without just spending money, because money is there. Another recommendation is to really evaluate your software licensing redundancy. A lot of school districts might have multiple digital tools that really honestly perform the same task, and it might be just because one teacher prefers this over another. And I realize it's hard to give some of those things up because we do. We fall in love with things that we know and things that we've used in the past. But when we have multiple things that do the same thing, and we have multiple licenses that are providing the same service. We have a chance to identify and eliminate these redundancies and really consolidate into one or two robusts platforms. This helps save some money and it really simplifies training for staff in the long run too. And if it's a tech related thing, it's going to help your tech department focus their efforts on supporting only one or two instead of multiple software licenses. There was a recent study actually in the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities where they talked about smart operational adjustments. They talked about things like this, and in fact, they consistently cited that having the least negative impact on academic outcomes has to be a priority. We all know the old adage says a penny saved is a penny earned, and at times this is really what we're looking for. Where can those pennies be saved so that we have some pennies to spend on kids down the road. All right, to quickly recap this budget discussion in Janelle, thank you again for sending in your question here, because unfortunately this is something that we are all dealing with and are going to continue to have to deal with, just as funding becomes tighter and tighter and tighter for our public schools. But I want you to remember a couple things. First of all, you want to advocate or look for savings and operational efficiencies. Look at your utilities, maybe some centralized purchasing, sometimes eliminating software redundancy. Any of these things can help, and it's certainly an area to look at first and foremost before we look at that true impact on students. I really honestly believe that financial challenges they force us to be better, and they force us to be more creative problem solvers. I guarantee that you have the resourcefulness and insight to advocate for smart systemic changes and still protect the core mission of your classrooms. This is just going to ensure that every dollar we save goes right back to the heart of our schools in supporting students. Again, thank you to Janelle, and thank you to David for sending in your mailbag questions. If you have questions you would like us to answer here on your morning boost, please just leave a comment of one of our social media platforms or send us an email at Adam at AWB Education dot Org and we'd be happy to feature you on our next episode of Your Morning Boost. But until that time, have a wonderful Tuesday, and thank you for listening. We will talk with you again tomorrow. That concludes another episode of Your Morning Boost. We hope today's daily dose of professional development helps you amplify knowledge, widen reach, and broaden impact. Your Morning Boost is an AWB Education production brought to you with the generous support of Grundmeyer Leader Services. Join us again tomorrow for more. Until then, keep boosting your impact.